There are various search engines available to conduct full text searches. However, full text searches often involves ambiguities in their search queries. Especially, traditional search technologies often provide incomplete or irrelevant results in the Corporate Performance Management (CPM) environments. In the CPM environments, CPM tools, such as Business Intelligence (BI) tools, are used to manage business oriented data and metadata.
Declarative taxonomies, which are well-defined, external subject hierarchies, are often used to disambiguate full text search queries. When searching a taxonomy for subjects related to a given set of search terms, full text search engines can match from zero to millions of subject items. The resulting “disambiguated” queries can contain literally millions of extra search terms. Searching for “popular” terms in the business environments, such as “sales”, “product” or “revenue”, often add too many additional subject related terms to be useful.
Search engines routinely use methods such as “page rank” references and other statistical and linguistic ranking criteria to create ordered search results. An example of such search engines is a page ranking engine that is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,526,440 issued to Bharat. However, these search engines are not sufficient to search complex data like business oriented metadata since they rely on ranking algorithms that work with data found primarily in the Global Internet and not inside a business.
Some search engines use taxonomies to improve search results. Creation of taxonomies has been carried out by a manual process or by an automated process based on advanced linguistic analysis. However, business taxonomies are difficult and expensive to build manually. Also, linguistic analysis is often complicated and thus prone to result in inaccurate outcome.
In addition, these search engines employ the statistical or linguistic ranking algorithms or methods over search results. Accordingly, these methods do not avoid the problems that are involved in the search results as described above.
It is therefore desirable to provide a system that provides better search results.